This description relates to techniques for providing a consistent user experience in information retrieval systems.
In an information retrieval system (e.g., a wordspotting system), to search a corpus of documents (e.g., set of audio files) one enters a query, typically in the form of a search term or Boolean expression of search terms. Then the system returns a set of putative hits (search results) based on the search query. Each putative hit is usually associated with a score, or confidence measure, (e.g., a score ranging from 0 to 1, with 1 being “better” than 0) which allows the set of putative hits to be ranked (e.g., a list of putative hits, sorted by descending score, can be constructed) and it also allows a threshold to be applied to the set, i.e., the set is partitioned in two disjoint subsets: one subset containing putative hits equal or above a particular threshold, and the other subset containing the putative hits below that threshold. In some systems, the threshold is fixed at a particular value for all queries, whereas in other systems, the threshold is adjusted for each query.